CIS 500 week 7: Dashboards

Dashboards (20 points) 

Read the article, “HPE Business Value Dashboard.”  Then, find an organization that has adopted a real-time dashboard for its internal use within the last three years. Do not repeat examples from the textbook or that have been posted by other students. Please respond to the following: 

o What are the most important parts of this dashboard? 

o How do these parts help the business managers? How do they help the individual contributors?

o Have real-time dashboards replaced the traditional business report? Justify your answer. 

Instructions:  Post your initial post early in the week (Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday).  It will take only a few minutes to address the following based on your reading this week.  Then return and interact with a few classmates by replying to their posts on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday.  When they reply to you, you can then return and do your final postings on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.  The more you interact with your classmates, the better the instructor will be able to gauge your grasp of the material.  Online discussions are the equivalent of classroom discussions in the traditional classroom — except that here, you get to edit what you say before you say it. Have fun!

Discussion

Data makes the world go around – but there is so much of it that is impossible to see connections and glean valuable insights without the proper tools. No wonder dashboarding and analytics have become a crucial part of almost any project since it is easier than ever for a business to determine and track their critical performance factors, analyze them using business analytics tools, and ultimately visualize their impact on the bottom line via dashboards.

Moreover, yet, when asked, 93% of executives believe that their organization is losing revenue as a result of not being able to analyze and leverage their data to the fullest. How could this be? With all the capabilities of Business Value Dashboards, there’s no reason why every organization should not be able to make the most of every piece of data point collected.

Notably, in highly sophisticated IT migration projects business value dashboarding is crucial. There are so many moving parts, interconnected resources, and dependencies as well as different teams – without these dashboards, it is nearly impossible to discern what the bottleneck is that might be holding up thousands of units at the moment.Companies need a more holistic view of both their information and public data to identify what actions should take. Improving this visibility enables business teams to make more strategic decisions.

A Business Value Dashboard (BVD), on the other hand, connects IT metrics with the appropriate key business indicators and enables IT organizations to analyze, validate and communicate the value they contribute to the group.With the power of today’s management dashboards, it is possible for end users to personalize their dashboard to suit their exact needs. If an executive manager wants their panel to contain a hyper-specific set of data and managing assets that a relevant to a given task, such as a large-scale IT migration, it can be done.

Rich Razon is business development manager at capacity planning and management company TeamQuest, which recently acquired PureShare, one of the firms Gartner watches in the business value dashboard space. “The original problem PureShare aimed at was providing a single system of operational metrics surrounding an enterprise IT environment,” he said. That involved PureShare setting up and amalgamating metrics for everything from space and cooling management to IT services management. Some of its initial customers included the New York Stock Exchange and Time-Warner.”We had a broad cross-section of experience of seeing actual IT environments,” Razon said. “Depending on the discipline and mindset of the leadership, that can equate to a drive toward improvement and greater maturity.” To keep up with market expectations, Razon says the product will be rebranded to include the business value dashboard buzzword. “I think that the right term if we could invent one would be ubiquitous access so that access to metrics is effortless.”